Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Gotta Have Faith

Faith That Moves Mountains is a wonderful saturated purple that I never used much in breeding since it didn't have a super fancy edge and that was what I was going for in past years. That changed in 2012 when I wanted to reduce some of the ruffling on seedlings that had gotten a bit out of hand (causing some hangups), while adding hardiness plus great saturated color in a large bloom to my breeding program. I used FTTM as a pollen parent on 15 plants, and I set pods on it from 21 different plants. It is not the easiest plant to set pods on, but I had a lot of blooms to work with and I was persistent.

Of the seedlings I have numbered this spring as being special, 10% of them are coming from FTTM breeding - at least double the percentage of seeds planted from it - so it is proving to be a much better parent than I had anticipated. They don't all have fancy edges, but great color is my top priority. It is doing rose colors as well as purple (and almost black when used with Soli Deo Gloria genetics) , plus grape eyes and lavender eyes. The first picture is FTTM, and then seedlings 23513, 18813, 12613, 23413, 17113, 14713, 22113, 17713, 16413, 8113.